Talks

Occasionally I give talks at meetups or conferences. A full history of my talks in the form of slides can be found on SpeakerDeck. Below is a list of the most recent talks I’ve given, along with any video recordings.

Condé Nast is a global publishing powerhouse - home to some of the largest names in fashion and luxury print and digital publications. In an effort to provide a cohesive vision for these brands across more than 30 markets, a truly global platform was required. Utilising AWS and Kubernetes at its core, the platform officially launched in September 2018 and serves over 200 million unique visitors/month.

Of course, operating Cloud Native Infrastructure is more than just spinning up a container orchestrator! Auxiliary services are required in order to operate it effectively and provide developers with a true platform experience. Open Source Software (OSS) forms the backbone for much of what we do. As such, this talk will be focusing on how Condé Nast utilises OSS to effectively operate multiple Kubernetes clusters across the world, paying special attention to observability, testing, application delivery, and developer experience.

Recording

Finding a Needle in a Call Stack - Intro to Distributed Tracing

In this session I explore the basics of distributed tracing. I then take a look at the OpenTelemetry (formally OpenTracing) standard - a vendor neutral framework for distributed tracing instrumentation. Finally, I take a hands-on look at distributed tracing in action using Jaeger, a popular open source distributed tracing tool which is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. By the end of this session I hope viewers will not only have a good understanding of distributed tracing, but will be equipped with the knowledge and inspiration to introduce it within their own applications.

[Video Coming]

Killing Bugs with KINDness - Kubernetes in CI with K8s in Docker (KIND)

KIND - Kubernetes IN Docker - is a relatively new tool for running Kubernetes clusters within Docker. KIND enables engineers to spin up local development cluster in under a minute, utilising Docker containers as “nodes”. KIND was originally born as a method of running conformance tests for the Kubernetes project itself, and has quickly gained in popularity within the community thanks to its fast startup time, ease of use, and growing feature set. In this talk I will briefly look at how KIND differs from other local cluster tools, discuss a range of possible use-cases for KIND - both for local development and within CI/CD pipelines, and finally demonstrate how you can get starting using KIND.

Recording

Lessons Learnt: Over 70 Interviews in Just 5 Weeks

5 weeks, 39 unique companies, and over 70 remote interviews. In this talk Josh will be sharing some of the lessons he learnt, and mistakes he made while searching for a job in the UK. He will present some interesting data on the interviews, discuss what he did right and wrong, the pain points he suffered, what he enjoyed, and finally - offers some advice for hiring managers and job seekers alike.